I was super curious, but never got near the thing.
My Dad realised there was an interest in computing, and for Christmas in nineteen hundred and eighty something, I got a ZX81, a 16K RAM pack, and a tape recorder. (... though was it 15K to make 16K in total????). I didn't really manage to do very much on it bar the usual PRINT / INPUT / GOTO.
Games were crazy expensive and I think I had three or four - 1K Breakout, 3D Monster Maze, Dodgems / Connect 4 and Sorcerers Island. Super exciting looking games from the cassette inlay, fairly crap to play. Everyone else was playing Jet Set Willy on their Spectrum 48K, BBC Micro and Commodore 64 and I was not.
I ended up with what I see now was a Filesixty keyboard.
While I didn't really manage to do much with it all, my Dad saw the continued interest and a BBC Micro soon followed. That became a BBC with sideways RAM, 1770 DFS, EPROM burner, a whole load of games and utils, then a Master 128.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Wavey lines ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A career in IT / Service Management / ServiceNow followed.
I bought everything back again, plus those machines I was always curious about (that C64, an Atari 2600). I love that each machine now has some form of SD interface.
Current setup is:
ZX81
A mint, composite modded, recently serviced ZX81, with a ZXpand, ZXpand membrane plus a fabulous mechanical Memotech keyboard. What a difference that makes.
It's mental how far the ZX81 was pushed to produce graphics far beyond what I saw in the day. Honestly, Manic Minor?
BBC Micro
Mint BBC Micro, ATPL sideways RAM board, Solidisk EPROM blower, EPROM eraser, Gotek, MMC Turbo, 40 / 80 track drive, User port splitter, joysticks, CUB monitor. Music 500 / 5000 hopefully on the way.
Commodore 64
Ah, the competition. What a disappointment. Great graphics and sound, terrible to programme. Mint C64 bread bin, Fast Loader, SD2IEC interface and CM8833 Philips monitor. ULTIMATE-II+L cartridge on order to make things properly work.
Atari 2600
Mint composite modded mint machine. PAC Man and Space Invaders.
Standby alert 